Military Interrogations: No Torture, But They Should Be Harsh

Americans are going to die one day, if they haven’t already, because of the mainstream media’s obsessive attempts to build Abu Ghraib up from a molehill into a mountain that can be toppled onto the Bush administration and the war effort in Iraq. Here’s part of an email from an Army interrogator to the Corner that explains what I’m talking about…

“…(N)ow that we’ve had the congressional debates, the WSJ articles and all of the hand wringing, Gen. Sanchez has banned 9 more techniques overseas – and this isn’t the crazy stuff you’ve heard of, like simulated drowning, which we don’t teach – including sleep deprivation, hooding (which is as much a safety technique for us and the prisoner as an interrogation preparation technique). I figure than any more DOD knee jerking and we’ll be reduced to singing “Kumbayah” to guys that we’ve caught either planning to kill Americans or who have killed Americans.

Some parting shots.

Interrogation has saved thousands of US and US military lives – especially in Afghanistan with that thug Gulbudin Hekmatyr, with his 50,000 soldiers (sic), who has publicly stated that his goal is the overthrow of the Karzai Gov’t and the expulsion of all US forces – who daily plots ambushes, road side bombs, and sniper attacks against US personnel. It was two interrogators that got the information that lead to the capture of Saddam. People in my office in 1999 (can’t say where) helped wrap up the millennium plot. Despite the bombings you see regularly in Iraq, interrogations are foiling on a daily basis plans to kill Americans (big country, unfortunately you can’t interrogate everybody).”

As I’ve said before when I talked about Abu Ghraib, I don’t support the naked piggy piles, sexual molestation, beatings, threats against people’s families, or making prisoners crawl over broken glass. The people who did those things to Iraqi prisoners are a disgrace to the uniform and deserve court martials & jail terms.

However, that being said, military prisons during war time aren’t supposed to be summer camp either. And we can’t afford to tie our military interrogator’s hands when they’re dealing with terrorists and insurgents who are holding our people hostage, setting up ambushes, and planning to slaughter Iraqi civilians with car bombs. So when it comes to doing things like hooding prisoners, taking away the Koran, manipulating diets, shaving beards, isolation, threatening (not attacking) them with dogs, sleep deprivation, & stress positions, I’m all for it.

“But, what about their Constitutional rights!”
They’re not Americans and they’re not in America, so they have no Constitutional rights.

“But, what about the Geneva Convention?”
They don’t wear uniforms or follow the rules of warfare, so the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply to them.

“I don’t care about that, I still say they’re covered by the Geneva Convention!”
Then screw the Geneva Convention. We’ve never fought an enemy who abided by it and as Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, & Paul Johnson — God bless their souls — could tell you, our enemies care nothing about any sort of rules of warfare.

“But, what if they treated our prisoners that way?”
It would be a huge step up from how our men are being treated now.

Maybe you think that’s harsh, but this is a war and getting information out of these terrorists & insurgents we’re capturing is literally a matter of life and death, not only for Iraqi civilians, but for American soldiers. Maybe some people might think threatening a terrorist with a dog or keeping him up for a couple of nights in a row is inhumane. But, if the choice is between doing that and having an American die in Iraq instead of coming home to his family — and it is — then that should be a really easy call for us to make.

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